Germany has closed its border to visitors from Europe due to coronavirus, but migrants claiming asylum from the Middle East and Africa are still allowed to enter the country.

Aside from exemptions for people from France, Luxembourg, and Switzerland who are providing essential services, German authorities closed the country’s border to all foreign citizens last week.

However, according to the German Ministry of the Interior, so-called “asylum seekers,” a catch-all term that basically describes economic migrants fleeing from the Middle East and Africa, are still welcome.

“At Germany’s EU external borders [airports and seaports], there has been no change in the [asylum] procedure,” a representative of the Ministry of the Interior told Junge Freiheit.

This means that Europeans who previously had a right to enter Germany are being treated as second class citizens compared to migrants from the third world, who merely have to utter the word “asylum” to enter Germany and have their case heard, even in the midst of a deadly global pandemic.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

“In practice, this means that if a migrant were to illegally enter the European Union’s Schengen Zone via Italy or Greece and make it to France or Switzerland, he can still demand asylum in Germany, and thus must be allowed to traverse these countries so that he can formally request it on German territory,” reports Voice of Europe.

The situation is similar in Sweden, where asylum seekers will continue to be processed and allowed to stay in the country despite a global pandemic.

Given that migrants already in Germany rioted and displayed ISIS flags when told their refugee camp had to be put in quarantine, one wonders whether newly arrived asylum seekers will obey lockdown rules.

As Breitbart highlights, attempts to enforce a quarantine in migrant-heavy areas of Paris are proving “impossible” because migrants just ignore the law and congregate in large crowds if confronted by police. Authorities cannot hand out fines to migrants due to fears of a violent “backlash.”

An Ipsos survey released last week showed that a majority of people in 12 different countries supported closing the borders until the coronavirus outbreak is contained.